I am looking for a tool which can identify tracks within an mp3 image so I can access the tracks independently.

What is going on is that I have downloaded an album from youtube that has never been released as a CD (yet) and the audio is reasonable. I plan to strip the audio out so that I end up with an mp3 album image that I would like to be able to identify the individual tracks in so I can access them individually and label them. Basically, I want to manually create all the album metadata.

By "MP3 album image" I'm going to assume you mean the entire album is stored in a single continuous MP3 file.

I don't know of any software designed specifically for the purpose of splitting an album. The only way I could think of for doing it would be guesswork based on the running time, detection of silence, things like that. An automated system wouldn't always work.

Since we're looking at a single album, that means probably eight to twelve tracks, so it may be best to split them manually. You're going to be tagging them anyway, so it's not much more effort. MP3directcut can split a single MP3 file into multiple tracks, without re-encoding.

By "MP3 album image" I'm going to assume you mean the entire album is stored in a single continuous MP3 file.

Yes, that's right the entire album of 10 tracks as a single mp3 file.

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I don't know of any software designed specifically for the purpose of splitting an album. The only way I could think of for doing it would be guesswork based on the running time, detection of silence, things like that. An automated system wouldn't always work.

Since we're looking at a single album, that means probably eight to twelve tracks, so it may be best to split them manually. You're going to be tagging them anyway, so it's not much more effort. MP3directcut can split a single MP3 file into multiple tracks, without re-encoding.

I'm not so much looking to split the tracks out into individual files though I guess I could do that manually with an sound editor like Audacity. What I was hoping for was something like a seek table, or cuesheet or something similar that would work with the single mp3 file. I don't know much about the mp3 file format so it may not even be possible. I normally rip all my CDs into single file flacs which are played using foobar so this is what I have in mind for this mp3.

mp3DirectCut has pause detection, which you can then save as a CUE sheet that works in foobar2000. You can also use utils like pcutmp3 with such a CUE sheet to split the mp3 into potentially-gapless separate files.

The latest mp3DirectCut also works with raw AAC files (not MP4 or M4A files - you need to extract the raw AAC stream - some video convertors will do this for you or tools like ffmpeg, I think). That could also be useful for modifying the audio from videos, which is often natively stored in AAC (though some audio extraction tools transcode to mp3 instead).

Edit: I meant to mention that pause detection might not be totally accurate, so you might need to edit the CUE file in Notepad to remove spurious tracks and/or title the tracks.

The latest mp3DirectCut also works with raw AAC files (not MP4 or M4A files - you need to extract the raw AAC stream - some video convertors will do this for you or tools like ffmpeg, I think). That could also be useful for modifying the audio from videos, which is often natively stored in AAC (though some audio extraction tools transcode to mp3 instead).

Actually, you are right... I just checked and the audio is in fact AAC. I don't know why I just assumed it was mp3. Yes, I plan to extract the audio using (probably) ffmpeg and get rid of the slide show video which I don't care about anyway.

The latest mp3DirectCut also works with raw AAC files (not MP4 or M4A files - you need to extract the raw AAC stream - some video convertors will do this for you or tools like ffmpeg, I think). That could also be useful for modifying the audio from videos, which is often natively stored in AAC (though some audio extraction tools transcode to mp3 instead).

Actually, you are right... I just checked and the audio is in fact AAC. I don't know why I just assumed it was mp3. Yes, I plan to extract the audio using (probably) ffmpeg and get rid of the slide show video which I don't care about anyway.

So is a cuesheet the only way to go for this?

It's the easiest if you only intend to play back in fb2k

If you want to play on a phone a DAP or in a car, I guess you can use mp3directcut to split the AAC at the CUE points. If it doesn't need to be gapless that's probably OK. You could then wrap the AAC up in an MP4 and probably name it .m4a for compatibility.

If you want to play on a phone a DAP or in a car, I guess you can use mp3directcut to split the AAC at the CUE points. If it doesn't need to be gapless that's probably OK. You could then wrap the AAC up in an MP4 and probably name it .m4a for compatibility.

Ok, I have stripped the AAC audio out of the video file with ffmpeg and named it a .m4a. Worked great, audio plays just fine, file size is now less than half the original size which is great.

Now that I know that this is not an mp3 any suggestion for AAC tag editors for the metadata?

If you want to play on a phone a DAP or in a car, I guess you can use mp3directcut to split the AAC at the CUE points. If it doesn't need to be gapless that's probably OK. You could then wrap the AAC up in an MP4 and probably name it .m4a for compatibility.

Just to close the loop on this, mp3directcut didn't work for me. The AAC audio stripped from the video was rejected as incompatible by mp3directcut so I renamed it .aac but this just wedged mp3directcut at 100% CPU for 15-20 minutes before I killed it.

So I went to Audacity instead. It's been awhile since I used it but it was quick to figure out. Audacity has two useful tools, detect silence and detect sound which are the inverse of each other. A quick pass with detect silence located all the track breaks along with a little hand cleanup. Then I was able to label each identified clip with the track name and export each clip with track name tags as seperate track files.

So this worked and was pretty simple though not what I had hoped for as Audacity did go through a decode and reencode of the source and I ended up with the split track files rather than my preference of maintaining a single file with subsong indexing. The result still sounds decent though and I'm pleased to finally get to hear this album again. However, the moment it comes out on CD I'll be purchasing it to add to my flac library to replace this.

Anyway, thanks for the help and maybe someone else can find this useful.

If you want to play on a phone a DAP or in a car, I guess you can use mp3directcut to split the AAC at the CUE points. If it doesn't need to be gapless that's probably OK. You could then wrap the AAC up in an MP4 and probably name it .m4a for compatibility.

Just to close the loop on this, mp3directcut didn't work for me. The AAC audio stripped from the video was rejected as incompatible by mp3directcut so I renamed it .aac but this just wedged mp3directcut at 100% CPU for 15-20 minutes before I killed it.

In my limited experience, streamed videos with music may well use HE-AAC, rather than LC-AAC. Foobar2000 will probably confirm which encoding mode is used. It might be that mp3DirectCut only supports LC - I have absolutely no idea. It might also be possible to rebuild the stream in foobar2000 - I can't recall what the right-click Utils menu contains for AAC, but rebuilding the stream might be helpful.

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So this worked and was pretty simple though not what I had hoped for as Audacity did go through a decode and reencode of the source and I ended up with the split track files rather than my preference of maintaining a single file with subsong indexing. The result still sounds decent though and I'm pleased to finally get to hear this album again. However, the moment it comes out on CD I'll be purchasing it to add to my flac library to replace this.

Knowing the locations of the cut points (which you can read off the bottom of Audacity, and set the mode to minutes:seconds:frames) you can also create your own CUE sheet in a text editor (get one, copy and rename it, then edit it in Notepad), and simply use that in foobar2000 to play the CUE (which would reference the AAC, but use type WAVE) or Convert with breaks at frame boundaries.

If you need to decode-encode, you could consider lossless (big files) which is no worse quality than the decodes AAC. You could also consider near-lossless such as lossyWAV encoded with FLAC (from about 310-450 kbps in extraportable to standard settings) which won't introduce some of the transcoding problems that you might worry about with a second transform codec.

But yeah, don't sweat it too much. You'll at least enjoy the music until it's released on CD.

In my limited experience, streamed videos with music may well use HE-AAC, rather than LC-AAC. Foobar2000 will probably confirm which encoding mode is used. It might be that mp3DirectCut only supports LC - I have absolutely no idea. It might also be possible to rebuild the stream in foobar2000 - I can't recall what the right-click Utils menu contains for AAC, but rebuilding the stream might be helpful.

Well, the output from ffmpeg regarding the stream is this which I don't know if it is HE or LC.Stream #0.0(und): Audio: aac, 44100 Hz, stereo, s16, 95 kb/s

Fb2k plays the stream as-is with no problem

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Knowing the locations of the cut points (which you can read off the bottom of Audacity, and set the mode to minutes:seconds:frames) you can also create your own CUE sheet in a text editor (get one, copy and rename it, then edit it in Notepad), and simply use that in foobar2000 to play the CUE (which would reference the AAC, but use type WAVE) or Convert with breaks at frame boundaries.

Yeah, I did consider this. Audacity can export the labels with names and time values which I could have edited into a cuesheet. The reason I didn't go this route is because my entire library has both the cuesheet and flac file with embedded cuesheet so I have suppressed fb2k from including cuesheets to eliminate duplicates.

QUOTE

If you need to decode-encode, you could consider lossless (big files) which is no worse quality than the decodes AAC. You could also consider near-lossless such as lossyWAV encoded with FLAC (from about 310-450 kbps in extraportable to standard settings) which won't introduce some of the transcoding problems that you might worry about with a second transform codec.

I didn't worry about the Audacity conversion much. It works with floating point internally. It was just the issue of having to go through the lossy decode/encode process at all.

QUOTE

But yeah, don't sweat it too much. You'll at least enjoy the music until it's released on CD.

Well, if you right-click and open Properties (or select and hit Alt-ENTER), then switch from the Metadata tab to the Properties tab behind that, under Codec it will say AAC, and under the Codec Profile entry it will say AAC LC if it's Low Complexity, or AAC SBR if it's HE-AAC. I think HE-AACv2 will probably mention PNS as well.

Well, if you right-click and open Properties (or select and hit Alt-ENTER), then switch from the Metadata tab to the Properties tab behind that, under Codec it will say AAC, and under the Codec Profile entry it will say AAC LC if it's Low Complexity, or AAC SBR if it's HE-AAC. I think HE-AACv2 will probably mention PNS as well.

Great suggestion, don't know why I didn't think of that. Ok, from the Properties of the audio track that was directly stripped out of the video it is Codec: AAC, Codec profile: AAC LC and the encoding tool is Lavf53.21.0.

Not that this matters now as I am satisfied with the current result until I can rip my own flac from the CD if it gets released.

Not sure if this matters or if you've already taken it into account, but generally you don't want to work with the raw AAC stream (something.aac); you still want to have it be in an MP4 container (probably named something.m4a for convenience). What did you use to extract the audio? ffmpeg?

Not sure if this matters or if you've already taken it into account, but generally you don't want to work with the raw AAC stream (something.aac); you still want to have it be in an MP4 container (probably named something.m4a for convenience). What did you use to extract the audio? ffmpeg?

Yes, I used ffmpeg and named the output file .m4a which Audacity and fb2k both read and played with no issue. And Audacity generated all the track files as .m4a as well.

Alternatively, you can try chapter if it is an AAC file (of course it is required to be wrapped in MP4 container).

This sounds interesting. How does one add chaptering then?

There are chaptering tools in foobar2000 (right click, Utils, MP4 chaptering... select a CUE file). I've only used chapters for MP4 video before, where I used Handbrake to apply the chapters. (Windows Media Player ignores chapters, but Quicktime uses them)

If you have a whole album as one MP3, it is possible that it was packaged with AlbumWrap. It's like a primitive chapter system for MP3. AlbumWrap software can split tracks back into individual MP3s if that's what you want, although the original software site is long gone.